...Joseph Drury The dynamic structural model for the erotics of narrative in the eighteenth century was not l'homme moteur of Freud but l'homme machine of French philosopher Julien de la Mettrie. Set in this context, the narrative digressions symbolized by Corporal Trim's arabesque in Tristram Shandy...

... property as well as by marriage through her ability to transform the interiority afforded by her everyday possessions into a movable estate of the self. Servants and workers in eighteenth-century England, like Richardson's heroine, commonly used locked boxes and trunks to contain their belongings and...

...Susan S. Lanser Scholars have rightly argued that one underpinning of the novel as it “rises” in the eighteenth century is its investment in consolidating heteronormativity. Reading narrative form as a site of sexual content, however, makes the case for a sapphic undertext embedded primarily in...

... or charlatan manipulating a narrative full of spectacular coincidences and implausibilities. Historians of science, however, have shown that performances with spectacular machines played a key role in establishing the epistemological authority of empirical science in the eighteenth century. Like...

...Dierdra Reber Abstract This essay traces a conceptual through-line from the twenty-first century crisis of democratic institutionality, explained as an effect of contemporary neoliberalism, back to the eighteenth-century discursive origins of free-market capitalism. On both ends of this temporal...

...Lisa O'Connell My paper re-historicizes the eighteenth-century marriage plot by shifting attention away from both the history of literary genres and the modes of social history that have generally informed accounts of the rise of the novel. Drawing instead on recent historiography of the period's...

...Elizabeth Maddock Dillon This article turns to the space of the colony in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world to offer an alternative theory of the novel—one that defines colonial geographies as constitutive of the novel as a genre rather than as marginal and inessential. In looking to such...

... temporality of jazz or, more specifically, between prolepsis and parabasis. My essay looks at Paul de Man's and Georg Lukács's assertions that the novel is an essentially proleptic form and argues that the specific form of prolepsis it brings with it from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is out of...

...Franco Moretti My essay poses three questions: Why are novels in prose? Why are they so often stories of adventures? Why was there a European but not a Chinese rise of the novel in the course of the eighteenth century? Disparate as they may sound, the questions have a common source in the guiding...

...George Boulukos The rise of the middle class in eighteenth-century England has long been called into question in British historiography. This essay, following the lead of Dror Wahrman's Imagining the Middle Class , reads the significance of claims linking the novel and the middle class rather than...

... of the eighteenth century, it also began its course as a transnational genre for the first time. Its transnationality was an effect of a particularly modern set of practices and attitudes about translating fiction in the European core. Thus transnationalism describes a new period in prose fiction's...

...Clifford Siskin The primary analytic tools of modern literary criticism were forged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries out of print culture's effort to consolidate its hold on society by making more out of its objects. The further we have burrowed in—sacralizing only a few texts...

... assumptions of the eighteenth-century novel (and scholarly accounts of it), the connection between witnessing and truth in fiction came under investigation in the Romantic-era novel. Maturin's novel is only one of a clutch of what one might call antihistorical narratives that appeared in these decades, in...

...William B. Warner It seems quite likely that the emergence of the public post in the late seventeenth century had as profound an effect upon the media culture of the eighteenth century as the emergence of the networked computer has had in our own day. The post is a public system, through which you...

...Sarah Winter This essay identifies a new subgenre of the novel, the novel of prejudice, which appears at the end of the eighteenth century. Modeling an awareness of prejudice as an ethical and political problem of modernity distinct from the reader identification and empathy associated with...

...Nancy Armstrong This essay looks at the form of sovereignty that Alexis de Tocqueville saw as uniquely American in relation to the form of self-sovereignty that had developed in eighteenth-century England and France. By 1840, American democracy had, in Tocqueville's view, become the perfect...